Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/101

Rh sunk into the chalk, and similar shafts have now been found beneath the rampart. Many of these were opened, and were found to contain, amongst the rubble with which they were partially filled, well-chipped celts and ruder implements, quantities of splinters and minute chippings of flint; flakes, some worked on one or both faces; some few boring-tools and scrapers; and many stones that had been used as hammers. Most of the flints had become quite white on the surface, as is often the case when they rest in a porous soil. Parts of antlers of red deer, remains of horse, goat, boar, and ox (Bos longifrons), oyster and a few other marine shells and snail-shells, as well as fragments of charcoal and rude pottery, were also found. At the base of one of the pits explored by Mr. Willett, galleries were found of precisely the same character as those at Grime's Graves, near Brandon, and at Spiennes, near Mons, in Belgium, which I have already described, and it is evident that they were excavated for the purpose of procuring flint, to be chipped into the form of implements upon the spot. It does not appear certain that the portions of antler which were found had been used, as in the other cases, as picks for digging in the chalk; but, possibly, some of the roughly-chipped flints, adapted for being held in the hand, and not unlike in form to the chopper-like flints from the far older deposit in the cave of Le Moustier, Dordogne, may have been thus used, or as wedges to split the chalk. This is by no means inconsistent with their having been originally flints partially trimmed into shape, in order to be made into celts, and used for a secondary purpose when it was found that they were not adapted for what they were at first intended to be. In chipping them out, the part of the nodule best suited for being held in the hand would be thus grasped, and the opposite edge be trimmed by the hammer, and in this manner the semblance of a chopper would be produced in what was merely an inchoate celt. I have found flints on the Sussex Downs, with one side trimmed in much the same manner as the Cissbury specimens, but which, from their form, can hardly have been intended for "choppers."

Looking at a series of the worked flints from Cissbury, exclusive of flakes and mere rough blocks, the general facies is such as to show that the ordinary forms of celts, or hatchets, were those at which, in the main, the workmen aimed. A small proportion of them are highly finished specimens, not improbably hidden